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10/30/14 The Inevitability of Rehabilitation

Sooner or later, they’re going to come for people you do like. Fredrik DeBoer

I was captured by an op-ed piece in The National Review‘s on-line edition by Charles C.W. Cooke which referenced an essay by Deboer, quoted above. To be clear, I did not fully read either essay, but was so captured by the quote and the cause that precipitated it I was inspired to write something about it.

You can read the essays mentioned above, if you’d like. I won’t mislead you with the mere portions of them I read….but you can count on one thing: in an age of hypersensitivity, political correctness, and a diet of multicultural-diverse-melodrama, eventually we will all need to be rehabilitated. Have you had your cultural rehabilitation, yet? If not, then surely it is only a matter of time. I suppose the hardest part for the rehabilitators is when they are turned on by those accomplices they formerly empowered, having poignantly been advised of their need for immediate rehabilitation..

I think it is an extreme irony when a culture one celebrates condemns its celebrators. In an age of open-minded diverse/cross cultural celebration, it would be well to remember that those whose culture is being celebrated (or studied, or analyzed, if you will) are perhaps not completely happy about being celebrated. At first, there are the warm feelings of camaraderie, but eventually, those thus studied become attuned to the idea that they are being studied. Eventually, this becomes tiresome, intrusive, and patronizing, even if it is precipitated by honest intentions. When the game is no longer fun to the observed, they will turn on their observers. This is to be expected, though the harshness of the turn may not be. Having found himself in great danger, the observer who declares the harshness of the culture he formerly observed may then find himself attacked by his fellow observers.

Eventually, they will come for us all. Eventually, we will all need rehabilitation. There is no safe haven, anymore…not even a church pulpit, if the mayor of Houston has her way. But she won’t. Not this time, since she was mistaken in the limits of her power, which, apparently, she thought had no limitations. It is likely that she was persuaded by cooler heads in her own camp that she was out of bounds. They will rehabilitate her and train her to not be so direct in her assault next time. She must learn the art of subtlety.

Rehabilitation. Some of Bill Maher’s supporters are now crying for his rehabilitation. I am not a fan of Bill Maher, and have written about him before, but I do admire his consistency. We should all strive to be consistent. If we are able to be so, it can be rightly interpreted that we have some standards. In an age of relative situational flexibility, standards are dangerous deadweight. Standards declare to the world that we are narrow-minded. Standards impeach fifty shades of gray, for if ones standards are a standard fifty shades of gray, then one has no standards.

Thank goodness for a recognizable reality that is not formed by my opinion of it, as most of the time, reality is not interested in my opinion.

Then, again, perhaps you aren’t either.

Just remember…In the midst of vendettas of political-correctness, sooner or later our friends can turn on us, or we’ll look around and times will have changed without our permission, and all our friends are all dead, irrelevant, or too busy with health issues and trying to find a physician that accepts the narrow-network insurance they have, so narrow that it saves insurers money by not having any participating providers, that we find ourselves all alone out there, standing at the edge of the precipice, peering over into the abyss, with not so much as a kite string being tossed our way since we are now pariahs in need of rehabilitation and toxic until completely rehabilitated, perhaps toxic forever, banished into exile for actually having an opinion we think worthy of holding on to. Perhaps rehabilitation will cure us of our opinions.

It is in the nature of men to misinterpret the endorsement of a fickle public as a permanent mandate for great change. It is in the nature of men to take too much authority, too soon, and hold on to it by any means for too long. Things do change, but then, before we know it, they have changed again, the change perhaps far along before it was even noticed. At that time, we will need rehabilitation since all the people we don’t like will have been rehabilitated, already. Then, the rehabilitators have no one to go for except those who are like us, or are us, since their purpose is rehabilitation, and they are determined to pursue their purpose with vengeance.